Where legal systems and market forces enforce contracts inadequately, vertical integration can circumvent these transaction difficulties. But, such environments often also feature highly interventionist government, and even corruption. Vertical integration might then enhance returns to political rent-seeking aimed at securing and extending market power. China offers a suitable background for empirical examination of these issues because her legal and market institutions are generally weak, but nonetheless exhibit substantial province-level variation. We report that Chinese firms in the 2000's are more vertically integrated than the U.S. firms in the 1990s. We find that vertical integration is more common where legal institutions are weaker and where regional governments are of lower quality or more interventionist. Further, firms led by insiders with political connection are more likely to be vertically integrated. Finally, vertical integration among politically unconnected firms is associated with elevated per capita GDP level and growth, while vertical integration among politically connected firms is unrelated to local economy performance.

We examine the diversification choices and financial performance of companies run by former bureaucrats in China. We find that the ex-bureaucrat led companies are involved in more diversified business lines than other firms managed by professionals without such government backgrounds. While former bureaucrats that manage state-owned enterprises (SOEs) tend to operate in unattractive industries, those who manage private firms do businesses in more profitable, faster-growing, and more related industries. The diversification of private firms is helped by additional borrowing capacity brought in by ex-bureaucrat CEOs, while no such financing effect is found in SOEs. The overall diversification performance associated with bureaucrat CEOs is positive in private firms, but not in SOEs. As manifested by the different diversification strategies and outcomes between private firms and SOEs, the government-linked CEOs facilitate transfers of critical business resources that benefit either owners' or governments' goals.

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of founding family engagement in firm ownership and management. We hypothesize that families manage their firms because they are able to make contributions that non-family managers cannot provide. However, roadblocks arising from within the family, from markets, and from surrounding institutions challenge family ownership. We propose a new framework for organizing these assets and roadblocks, called the family business map; this framework is useful for categorizing the papers presented in this Special Issue. We support the predictions of the framework with evidence from Chinese family firm succession, and conclude that family firm organization is an adaptation to environmental opportunities and constraints. We end the paper with suggestions for future research.

ABSTRACT This article disentangles the incentive and entrenchment effects of large ownership. Using data for 1,301 publicly traded corporations in eight East Asian economies, we find that firm value increases with the cash‐flow ownership of the largest shareholder, consistent with a positive incentive effect. But firm value falls when the control rights of the largest shareholder exceed its cash‐flow ownership, consistent with an entrenchment effect. Given that concentrated corporate ownership is predominant in most countries, these findings have relevance for corporate governance across the world.